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Aug 31, 2008

I have an Earl-esque list of things to do on my blog, and I never get through them.

But here's my chance to cross off something I have been meaning to mention for months. The International Noise Conference is an alternative music event - make that a very alternative music event - that took place in the States earlier this year

Artists (one pictured here, taken by mbcharbonneau) are under more pressure than a bull on rollerskates in a house of cards: they can play no more than a meagre quarter of an hour, plus laptops and mixers are banned.

I guess the best way to get noticed is to have a good name. It works for the Edinburgh Festival, with Fringe show names like Five Hours Of Farting and One Man And His Gimp*.

So with a Matthew Herbert Big Band-style toot of a fanfare, I present to you my 20 favourite eye-catching band names from the Miami leg of the conference, in no particular disorder.

Aug 19, 2008

My recent post about unearthed goodies from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop brought to mind an album by Black Devil which was lost for over 25 years before having the dust blown off by Rephlex.

That album was Disco Club (in 2004 I think), and since then the duo have renamed themselves Black Devil Disco Club and released several more albums. The latest, Eight Oh Eight (pictured), has just come out so I thought I'd write up a little review, bury it, and have it dug up in two decades by a trenchcoated man with cruddy fingernails.

Eight Oh Eight is a touch disappointing. Opening track With Honey Cream sounds like Jimmy Somerville in a tube. But then it all begins to sound like Jimmy Somerville in a tube, with pure high energy disco funnelled through an increasingly wacky range of effects like flanged beats and robotic vocals.

I'm a sucker for the Air-esque cheesiness that Black Devil have plumped for, but I can see how the cheese could grate. The bongos and whistles on at least a couple of the tracks (Open The Night and Never No Dollars) are my least favourite sounds since the noise of cluster bombs missing army officer James Blunt.

Aug 13, 2008

"Thereafter, a whole series of things is going on. It's like having a car; when there are a few miles on the clock, things start to break down. Our resting heart rate increases and our muscle mass and strength decrease."

Aug 8, 2008

I was going to write a spectacular post about 808 State in honour of the comely curvature of today's date.

Reminiscences would have poured from the edges of this blog until your keyboard was soggy with my moist-eyed memories, like when 808 State rocked Manchester a few days after the 1996 bombing, or when I bumped into one member of the band playing that saxophone in a recording studio.

I may even have uploadified a photo of my much worn 808 t-shirt declaring "there is no greater love than that between man and his cock." It had a picture of the kind of cock as seen in my terrible Youtube video here (2,500 hits mostly helped by my dubious tags).

My interweb domain would have come into it to, because fatroland.com was launched on 02/02/02. It plunged me into a six-year-long obsession with repeating dates.

I was going to write this amazing piece. But I didn't.

That's coz Music Thing has done a much better job with his celebration of the drum machine that gave 808 State their name.

So go and read that instead. It has lots of things for your mouse to click on, including a hyperlink for 808 State's aptly titled Olympic.